linn meyers's most recent series of paintings continue her deep engagement with the power and presence of the individual mark, and invite the viewer to acknowledge the artist’s body as the laboring force behind these painstakingly rendered works. Made up of thousands of meticulously ordered hand-drawn lines and ecstatic arrangements of dots, meyers’s paintings point to diagrammatic visual languages outside the traditional scope of fine art such as topographical maps, cosmological charts, or psychological landscapes that seek an order or logic to chaotic phenomenon. And yet, a reminder that paintings archive the traces and actions of their maker, meyers’s paintings turn lines into drags, dots into touches, each one a record of the constellations of decisions, mistakes, tensions, and interventions that adhere to each mark. While meyers’s new body of work is not narrative in a traditional sense, these paintings hold together the monumental and microscopic forces and feelings that creation, labor, and daily experience all share and ask us as viewer to unfurl those layers in discordant simultaneity.
-- Dr. Jordan Amirkhani, Curator, Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art and Thought, New Orleans, LA
bio
I see my work as an act of resistance to the ever-increasing speed and scale of the world in which we are living. My practice is dedicated to an unhurried, deliberate approach to image-making.
I make paintings, drawings, prints, and large-scale, site-specific wall drawings. Systems of mark-making based on the grid – a structure that implies stability, organization, and uniformity – propel my compositions. The slippages and imperfection of human touch inevitably challenge the order and predictability of the grid.
I earned my BFA from Cooper Union and my MFA from California College of the Arts. My works have been included in exhibitions and permanent collections in venues including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Phillips Collection (DC), the Hammer Museum, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, (CA), the Drawing Center, (NYC), the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, the Amore Pacific Museum of Art (Korea), and the British Museum, London, among others.
Awards and fellowships include a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and several grants from the DC Commission on the Arts. I have been an Artist In Residence at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC, Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Ireland, the Hayama Residency in Japan, the Iris Project in Los Angeles, the Bemis Center in Omaha NE, Millay Arts in Austerlitz, NY, the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, CA, Flying Horse Editions in FL, the Ucross Foundation, Wyoming, and the Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, NM.
I currently divide my time between Washington, DC, and Los Angeles.